The heart’s powerlessness of Bodil Malmsten new – Expressen

After 22 years recur Bodil Malmsten to poetry with “The This is the heart “, a collection of powerlessness and loss.

Electrical Grelsson Almestad reading a painful and comforting book about it inconceivable inevitable.

In Lydia Davis text ” Head, Heart, “head trying to help the grieving heart crying over the loss of their loved by explaining what man rationally know: You will lose all you love, just as the earth will disappear one day. An insight as true as impossible to take in, which probably contributed to the text’s status as a contemporary classic.

Is there a word for grief? In death, as we all must face, but nobody knows anything about? The head can explain, again and again, but only helps temporarily a grieving, disoriented heart.

In his first collection of poems in 22 years, “This is the heart,” does Bodil Malmsten no attempt to understand death or sorrow. She writes from a place of powerlessness over this very elusive:

This is what is death

you never responds again

But to understand it

Dictation Ego goes into mourning coach in Ropsten which takes 1 000 per hour to give advice on what to put words to it and accept the feelings, makes up with a god who does not believe in, visit the cardiovascular clinic where the arrhythmia is detected and through it all there all the time, this missing you.

The language is restrained and short as if it forces its way between the tears and silence. Grief characterize each line. It’s a loss that Malmsten prisoners in several particularly painful rows. Like when the self in the subway during rush hour sees a person who resembles the dead: “It must be you / It’s you.”

Since the realization that it can not possibly be the same person. “There will always / be not you.”

How life goes on even though everything has changed: “In your absence is / everything nothing.”

And maybe also manages the poem here with the simplest, and at the same time greatest, love the explanation: “Love is that I want / you are.”

In classic malmstenskt mannerisms is used anonymous myndighetsord, where the discrepancy between the human, bleeding emotions and language limitations emerges so clearly. In Bodil Malmsten they often receive a new existential meaning. At the clinic are encouraged self to go to the sister and ask for a new time and she falls down on his knees in prayer for a new time, a different time. “How to live the chronology / before and after your death.”

Nor is it the dead who are suffering, but they left behind.

“And really it’s too late when I begin to feel that initiate the writing is still never reach, “says Malmsten in a text about” This is the heart “on his blog. Similarly, notes poem ego distance between the pain and the expression of that of both sorrow coach, cardiovascular clinic and in her words.

Still, it’s a comforting and painfully accurate collection of poems about the unimaginable that everyone sooner or later face: to live on, although it will always be you do not.

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